Paradigm shift in mechanical system design: toward automated and collaborative design with digital twin web

Abstract Analyzing multi-vendor mechanical system designs requires a significant amount of manual work, resulting in a design paradigm where analysis is conducted only after the design is locked and components are selected. This leads to a suboptimal design with compatibility issues, over-dimensioned components, inferior performance, poor energy efficiency, and a lack of collaboration between OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and system integrators. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes Co-Des (collaborative design) framework for automated and collaborative multi-vendor system design. The framework relies on standardized digital twin documents (DTD) of system designs, components, and analyses. The discoverability and distribution of these DTDs are enabled with digital twin web (DTW). Co-Des framework allows for finding suitable components for the design task by automatically running selected analyses employing component digital twins. In addition, OEMs can provide customized components for system integrators using the initial system design defined in the system design DTD. The use of the Co-Des framework was demonstrated with a windmill powertrain design use case, and the applicability of the automated assembly analysis for component selection was verified with performance measurements. The adoption of the proposed framework will lead to a paradigm shift from manual and siloed work relying on the exchange of PDFs to a more automated and collaborative design of mechanical systems. The adoption rate is defined by the willingness of system integrators to publish their initial system designs and OEMs their components as public digital twins.